RaspyFi was brought to our attention a few days ago: it’s a distro designed especially for those with big media libraries who are using their Pis to listen to music. If you’re one of those people (I am, and I’m chuffed to bits to find RaspyFi), or an honest-to-god audiophile, you may have noticed that other media centre distros have been built to prioritise video rather than music, and don’t necessarily support all the formats your collection might be made up of; or give you the fine degree of control you want over volume and playback. And if you want to stream music wirelessly to other devices on your network, you’ll have to do a little more work with a traditional Raspberry Pi media centre (I can’t believe I’m saying “traditional” about a device that’s only been on the market for 18 months) to get everything working.

So RaspyFi has been engineered to address those issues. Apple AirPlay works out of the box, so you can stream to other devices without any extra work. The distro supports a large number of external USB DACs (there is a pleasingly lengthy list on the project website) and asynchronous playback, so you can use your other amplifiers and DACs instead of the one that’s onboard the Pi – which, let’s face it, wasn’t built for audiophiles.

The UI is really slick, and offers you a web interface you can use to control all your devices, so you can get to local or streamed content from your desktop, phone or tablet. I’ve been enjoying it so far: it’s intuitive, I can play music on any networked device with a web interface without having to install anything, and AirPlay just works – which is very pleasing.

I have some RPi’s connected to various speakers in different rooms. I can stream from my phone (or computer, or tablet) to any of them. However I have an old turntable in one of those rooms that I’d like to modify so it could have BT capabilities to stream to my other pi’s. Is there a way to do that?

Not an audiophile myself, nor do I really have a music collection. However, I was wondering if this is something that might be added to NOOBS at some point. Also, is NOOBS remotely upgradeable or would you have to re-download the software?

Like most people I have a big collection of music, mainly mp3’s but my problems is duplicates or albums with all but 1 or two tracks, the odd file that is not the whole track and tracks with no mete data so you do not know who it is etc.

Many tools claim to be able to sort all that out, few do.

Does anybody know of a killer app to do this so I can sort out my 38,0000 + tracks and then start to use this distro to play them

I don’t know how many tracks I have, lost count long ago, but certainly hundreds of vinyl albums (two generations’ worth) that I’ve recorded, cleaned and converted to mp3. Many of these I didn’t bother to write tag data for.

Most have the meta data, some have very little and some from compilation albums etc do not have artist information or track titles except track1, track2……

As to 38 K +

There is a market where I live, I buy old CD’s for a couple of quid each then rip them. The guy has got to know me so he allows me to then trade them back at 2 or 3 to one as long as I buy more which is fine by me so a lot have come that way.

I have 2 teenage sons, so a lot of them come from their CD’s, My wife has a collection of her stuff, CD’s I have borrowed and some that have come by other means….

If you use an mpd client such as mpc to build the Playlists that works quite fast. What takes time is the browser based editor that is quite slow to respond. I find it easier to ssh into the RPi and use mpc to build/edit Playlists with the results eventually showing up in the browser in a different window.

I worked on a similar project, but my goal was to get Raspberry Pi to stream audio from an online music streaming service. If interested head over to my blog and check it out… This is an opensource project btw. So feel free to contribute.

Hey, Liz I am pretty happy with RaspberryPi Musicbox but will have to try this RaspyFi for something featured. The strong thing about it is the audio and video decoding is probably done in hardware. However, I have a query that, How it can work with an external USB DACs?